Norwich ? A scholarly article on the white-winged diuca finch lists co-author Spencer P. Hardy’s affiliation as Marion W. Cross School. The word “Elementary” was dropped.

But to the ornithological world, the age of now 14-year-old Spencer Hardy is irrelevant to the phenomenon he helped document on a high-altitude ice field, in a mountain range he’s never visited, thousands of miles from his Vermont home: the first well-documented case in the world of a species other than penguins successfully nesting on the ice of a glacier.

The article was published in the Wilson Journal of Ornithology. Spencer’s co-author was his father Douglas, a glacier specialist with the Climate System Research Center at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Douglas started visiting the Quelccaya Ice Cap in Peru in 2003 as part of his work to help get a long-term climate history through dust trapped over the centuries in the ice at about 18,000 feet above sea level.

It was Spencer’s fascination with birds that led the elder Hardy to take pictures of every bird he saw in Peru.

After Douglas Hardy came home, Spencer would pore over the photos and use bird books to identify the species.